Isaiah 5:20
What does Isaiah 5:20 mean?
Woe to those who call evil good, and good evil; who put darkness for light, and light for darkness; who put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter!
The short answer
Isaiah 5:20 pronounces a "woe"—a cry of grief and warning—over people who swap moral labels. They "call evil good, and good evil," trade "darkness for light," and pass off "bitter for sweet." The imagery is deliberately jarring. Nobody honestly mistakes darkness for light or bitterness for sweetness; you have to work at it. That is exactly Isaiah's point.
The prophet is not describing simple confusion, the way a person might make an honest mistake about a hard ethical question. He is describing redefinition. The people in view know what they are doing is wrong, and rather than change their behavior, they change the vocabulary. What was evil gets renamed good. What was good gets dismissed as evil. The scholar John Oswalt observes that this takes real intellectual effort—sophisticated arguments constructed to prove that one's own darkness is actually light. And he traces the root of it: once a revealed word from God is no longer treated as the final authority, human reason alone has to carry the moral weight, and reason is easily hired by self-interest to argue for whatever we already want.
This also explains why the verse is a woe and not merely a lament. Renaming evil is not a private, harmless opinion. Oswalt puts it starkly: sin does not settle down beside righteousness and coexist with it, any more than disease coexists with health. It has to overturn the standard that condemns it. So the inverted labels of Isaiah 5:20 are an act of aggression against goodness itself—an attempt to destroy the categories that expose sin for what it is. The verse warns that God sees through the relabeling. Calling darkness light does not make it shine; it only makes the coming judgment more certain, because the people have dismantled the very language that could have called them back.
What scholars say
In his commentary on Isaiah, John N. Oswalt answers the question of how people come to call evil good in the first place—tracing the inversion to a refusal to accept the absolute authority of a revealed Word, and explaining why sin cannot simply live peacefully alongside righteousness.
“In order to justify their own behavior, they must, in the most sophisticated reasonings possible, demonstrate that their evil behavior is good, their darkness is light, and their bitterness sweet. This attitude is the end result of refusal to admit the absolute authority of a revealed Word (cf. v. 24). For sin is not content to live alongside righteousness anymore than disease will coexist with health. Sin can only be satisfied when righteousness is destroyed. If the ethical imperative is dependent upon human reason alone, that reason is no match for rampant self-interest. In fact, self-interest will press reason into service to justify its own behavior. Here are pictured the great men of the nation, who are only great behind a bar.”
What it means for you
The easiest way to read Isaiah 5:20 is as a verdict on someone else—the culture, the other side, the people we already disagree with. The harder and more honest reading turns the verse inward. All of us are skilled at renaming our own darkness. Resentment becomes "standing up for myself." Greed becomes "being responsible." Cruelty becomes "just being honest." The question this verse presses is simple: where have I rebuilt my moral vocabulary to keep a comfortable habit safe from scrutiny? A good practice is to notice where our justifications are most elaborate—that is often where the relabeling is happening—and to ask God for the plainer, truer name.
Isaiah 5 in context
Isaiah 5 opens with the Song of the Vineyard: God planted Israel like a choice vine, tended it carefully, and looked for good grapes—but it produced only wild ones. What follows is a series of six "woes" spelling out that bad fruit: land-grabbing greed, drunken revelry, brazen sin, arrogant self-trust, and corrupt courts that acquit the guilty for bribes. Isaiah 5:20 sits in the middle of this list, naming the move that makes all the others possible—redefining evil as good. The chapter ends with judgment gathering like a storm on the horizon.